Saturday, February 11, 2017

It Is Not About Getting Rid Of Gender, It Is About Getting Rid Of Men

Among mostly like-minded people, in other words people that sensibly agree with me, it is common to see one of the most pressing issues of the day as the attempt to completely erase the concept of gender. Gender fluidity is one of those buzzwords that is in common use today that would have been rightly considered to be complete nonsense even ten or five years ago. The elevation of transgenderism to the highest expression of human freedom and evolution is just the latest in the inevitable progression towards what would be an "ideal" society where gender no longer exists in a meaningful way.

I am beginning to modify my belief that the goal is the elimination of gender. It is instead a movement with the goal of eliminating one of the genders. What certain people with an outsized influence on our culture via the government, the "education" establishment and the entertainment world are really working against is masculinity in any recognizable form. The term "toxic masculinity" is tossed around a lot and was trending a bit on Twitter. From what I can tell, "toxic masculinity" is any behavior by a man that is distinguishable from what is traditionally considered feminine behavior. The mantra we hear ad nauseum is that men dominate our society, specifically White men and even worse heterosexual White men and worst of all heterosexual Christian White men. The story goes that these terrible men have made a general mess of things and need to be put in their place, their place apparently being in a studio apartment sitting on the couch playing video games while the mother or mothers of their children take care of them and work to support them.

Check out this pretty brilliant video by Camille Paglia, who clearly needs to switch to decaf, where she talks about "transgenderism" and the assault on masculinity:

"Everything is all about expanding women's rights but also terminating men, OK, defining men out of existence. Masculinity by definition is toxic"

Bam.

There it is. The real driving force behind decrying "toxic masculinity" is not about a backlash against guys who are chauvinistic jerks, it is about defining all expressions of masculinity by universally describing masculine thought and behavior as toxic. To be male is to be toxic and the solution is to eliminate masculinity by depicting masculinity as inherently harmful and extolling the virtues of effeminate men, advocating for "transgenderism" which is really about redefining the male of the human species out of existence and pitting men and women against one another in a one-sided battle where men are expected to shut up and listen attentively to the Very Serious Woman wearing a hat shaped like her genitals. For modern "feminists", the relationship between the genders is a zero sum game. For women to "progress", men must regress. Women can have no improvement in their lives without a corresponding diminishment of men's lives. Of course it is also worth noting that what feminists and gender warriors consider progress has been an absolute disaster for men, for families and children and especially for women. For all of the feminist "progress" over the last 50 years, does anyone seriously think women are happier? In my decades working in the professional workplace, the women I worked with in general didn't seem empowered or happy, they usually seemed to be torn in a dozen different directions and over-extended.

Also of note is Paglia pointing out that the move toward androgyny occurs at the end-stage of a civilization, what she calls "the late phase of culture" but that as that happens in "civilized" societies, on the outskirts are the Huns, the Vandals, and now ISIS where masculinity is often actually toxic. Today we have the advent of make-up companies like Covergirl putting for a 17 year old male make-up artist and Maybelline following suit with a male make-up model. When the next existential crisis faces our culture, who is going to defeat the Huns or ISIS? MannyMua swishing to the front line to win over ISIS with tips on how to apply mascara?

It doesn't empower women to demean, denigrate and diminish men.

The simple truth is that men are in trouble in this country. A huge percentage of prime working age men are out of the workforce. Not unemployed, because that term implies they are out of work but looking. I am talking about men simply not working and not looking to work. The future looks even more bleak as you look at trends.

In 2013, the gender ratio among that year’s college graduates was 57:43, women to men. That’s four women for every three men. With girls continuing to outpace boys in school and young women continuing to attend college in ever-greater numbers, the U.S. Department of Education now expects the ratio to approach three women for every two men by 2023.

I don't see a college degree as the only or even the best way to prepare men for meaningful lives of work and supporting a family but it certainly is one way and when you look at how few young people are prepared to take on the skilled trades jobs that are unfilled and rapidly entering a crisis mode for lack of qualified replacement workers to take over for retirees coupled with the growing disproportionate make-up of colleges, what exactly are men going to do in the future to earn a living? How are they going to support a family or even contribute meaningfully to supporting a wife and kids? It is easy to point to our unbroken string of male Presidents and the dominance of men in executive positions at corporations and claim that men are still dominate in our society but when you get away from the tiny fraction of elite men, the vast majority of younger men are in serious trouble and that spells trouble for our social order, especially families but we still get nonsense like the disproved "gender wage gap" and the guilt trip Audi Super Bowl commercial that makes it sound like women are being left behind.

This trend is echoed in the church as more and more women take over leadership roles in the church and men become increasingly absent from the church entirely. Christianity has always been a solidly masculine faith. God is described in male terms, His Son was obviously male, the twelve apostles were all male. Today in a lot of places you would think that Christianity was an almost exclusively female religion. Looking the best-selling "Christian" books and you get a combination of a lot of women writing flowery nonsense and men writing a lot of the same touchy-feely nonsense. We don't need more men in the church to get in touch with their feelings and their feminine side. We need more men in the church to act like actual men.

In our age of information and entertainment overload it can be easy to lose sight of the big picture and to connect the dots but the signs are all there. Two-time failed Presidential candidate and wife of serial philanderer Hillary Clinton said recently that "the future is female". Her message was clear. If the future is female, then it obviously also means that the future is not male. The future she pines for might be great for the elite women in this country but for the average American a future that is female means even more overloading of women with family responsibilities and even more diminishment of men and the elimination of masculinity. Our society, in fact no society, can survive in the world without both genuine masculinity and femininity. Women make poor substitutes for men and men aren't being helpful partners for women when they are staying at home instead of working. It would be great if Clinton said that the future was families but that is not expedient. If we are to have a future, we need strong, masculine men and strong, feminine women and a woman is not strong because she tries to act like a man and men certainly are not strong when they act like women. God made two genders to complement one another and to bring joy to each other. Anyone who cares about the future of Western civilization and especially anyone who cares about the church needs to speak out against and actively oppose the attempts by a few unhinged radicals to eliminate masculinity. We need more men being more masculine if we are to survive as a civilization,